Big Yellow House Christmas by the Room: Kitchen

How many Christmas trees are too many?

Wizard of Oz/Guest Room tree. I've made changes to it since I've put it up and I'm not completely done with it yet. But here it is so far.

Main bathroom tree

Master bedroom trees

Kitchen Tree

Sports Tree

Main Entry Hall Tree

Sun room tree which is my Charlie Brown tree.

Plus all the little trees outside.

And I still continue buying them.

I think it's a sickness.

The ever changing table

So one day I was out at a thrift store and found this little table and chair set for $19.99 and it came home with me.

Chuck sanded the ugly textured I have no idea green off of it and painted it to match the rest of the table.

Now that I look back at these pictures, it's funny to see my ladder back chairs blue when now they have been red for so long! Anyway, when we lived in this house I had a formal dining room and a kitchen nook so I had plenty of room. Now that we bought the big yellow house, I have no dining room at all and a small kitchen but I can't seem to give up either table. So the enclosed porch back room has become the laundry room on one side and dining room on the other side.

And this little table has recently taken up residence in my kitchen since I can leave the sides down for room if I want or put them up for more than 2 people to sit at if needed, although the chairs have been stored away.

And yes, it did turn black for a while. It was chalkboard. I thought it would be a fun homework table while I was watching my nephews. But since they have now gone, it was time for yet another change. It took a LOT of work for Chuck to get the paint off, but he finally did it and the end result is beautiful.

Let's revisit the kitchen

As you may remember, before I got to lazy to blog, I have a previous post called The Kitchen Before and After: but still a work in progress, and it seems to progress to something else all the time. I think I may be about finished this time. THINK.  So when we moved into our home in August 2010, the kitchen looked like this.

And then we worked on it some and it then looked like this.

Ok sure, it's a million times better but It just wasn't what I wanted in the end. So I took the doors off all the cabinets and used bead board wall paper on some, and cut the middles out and put chicken wire in some. And I removed the horrible fake wall that was around the back of the fireplace.

I painted the inside of the cabinets red, and the walls a kind of teal blue color. I then painted the trim around the window red. The fridge used to be right next to a pantry that was by the stove so I still consider this a naked wall until I find what I'm looking for (or build it) and hung up one of the original pantry doors for a chalkboard in the mean time. I still have to install new counter tops as well.

I added more cabinets and pantry space on a naked wall. This already has the butcher block counter top that will go in the rest of the kitchen. Here is the left side

Here is the right side

We built this window/mirror out of 10 mirrors from the Dollar Tree to try and get more light into the kitchen since there is only the one tiny window over the sink. And it now looks good and uncluttered thanks to some fabulous Facebook friends!

And there you have it. My kitchen as it is today. Will I change it again? Hmmmm, probably!

Speaking of Dishwashers

I got tired of looking at mine, and I'm not ready to purchase a new more efficient one yet

 

So I painted it. (ignore the camera spots please?)

 

I didn't even move it

 

I might have done it sooner if I had found this color sooner.

 

But I'm happy with it for now!

Confession Time Again

I'm not the neatest painter in the world. Sometimes I get lost in the project and ignore everything else, like what I'm touching, walking in, etc. Let's just paint, right!? Latex isn't so bad, it washes right off with soap and water and a little scrubbing. Oil, well, that's another story. I've actually shown people my paint colors by showing them my arm. Recently I was working on some lampshades and had gorilla glue all over my hands. It was horrible! I tried everything I had to get it off and nothing seemed to help until I tried this.

This is the pumice sponge that I use on my feet since I am barefoot 99% of the time. But it worked wonderful on removing the glue!

Recently, I've been painting this red which is an oil. My hands were still raw and sore from the chemicals I had put on them trying to remove the glue so I thought, why not try the sponge again?

Wonderful! You can see the bits of white and red paint on the sponge. If I keep this up I'm going to have the smoothest, shiniest hands in town.

My second confession is that sometimes after a full day of projects, I'm a little lax about dishes. Ok, I'm downright lazy about it! This was true the other day and dishes sat in the sink overnight without even a rinse! Gasp!

I had just the day before ran an empty cycle with this. Yep, koolaid! Supposedly the citrus in the lemonade flavor super cleans the dishwasher and for only 10 cents versus around $4 for the commercial cleaner, I thought why not?

My dishwasher isn't the newest on the block. (2 choices for washing, really?) It was here when we moved in and we have yet to get another one. But it works (probably not as efficient as a newer model though) so we go with it.

Anyhoo, I packed those dirty yucky dishes in that dishwasher, turned it on and went shopping. When I came home, they were so super clean! I have had instances before where I had done that pre kool-aid cleaning and had to take dishes out and scrub them and put them back in. But not this time, the kool-aid worked!

So do you have any confessions that maybe you learned something from?

How about flooring?

Nothing is straight in this house, floors, ceilings, walls, etc. We've decided to go with it, gotta love an old crooked house, right? It's only horrible when you have to do flooring or try to measure up or down from a wall. But yet, I hated the carpet and it had to go. With 2 dogs and 3 cats carpet is so not a good idea.

 Here is the horrible matching carpet and walls. Keep in mind that ugly box step to the kitchen for later.

My rug even looks horrible against it.

So one day while browsing pinterest, I came across a flooring post that would be WONDERFUL for my floor! The idea came from Quarry Orchard, even though they didn't even know what it would be when they started. I was happy to learn from them and took it all to heart!

 We ripped up all the carpet and padding. Gross huh? We (he) then removed all the carpet tack strips and together we pulled out the 5 million staples from the padding. The couch stayed in here the entire time because I ran out of room to stash furniture, it was like a maze in my house.

They didn't know they were staining the planks, we did. So when we found minwax stain for $2.50 a quart at ReStore, we knew we would stain the sub floor a darker color than our planks to show through the grooves. And it dries much faster than paint, so it was perfect! Somewhere along in this mess, I decided the horrible already painted to look like brick fireplace had to go, and before I knew it, I was priming it too.

Since this was a big job, we went to Sutherlands for the plywood and had THEM cut it into planks. We used 1/4" sanded red oak and had it cut in 5 7/8" strips so they would come out even. The living room joins with the guest room, sun room, kitchen and our bedroom/parlor. The kitchen has allure flooring in it that was chosen so it could get wet. The guest room has original hardwood floors that are kind of dark. The sun room floor is hard wood that is painted red. The bedroom/parlor has carpet but oh what a surprise I found under it. We weren't trying to be all matchy matchy so we decided to go with wide planks and a light stain because of the dark walls. We chose 1/4" so it would be flexible with our crooked floors.

We used ipswich pine for the plank stain, also purchased from Restore KC, nice huh? We did all the staining outside and between the 2 of us it didn't take too long because it dried quick. We also did the poly outside but it took a lot longer because we didn't have the room to lay it ALL out to dry between coats. That and it finally rained here on and off all week the week we decide to work outside, figures huh? We used 3 coats of poly on each plank. We used a poly made by Rustoleum that was only $24 a gallon versus twice that for other brands. They didn't have much feedback on it at Home Depot but since it was Rustoleum, we thought why not? It looks good and I see NO problems with it so far. I'm sold!

Now that's what I'm talking about! It looks 2000 times better in here now!

Remember the little box step? I told him my vision for the new step and he made it come to life. Even better than I imagined. Yep, that's one of the things I love about him! Isn't it fabulous?

I'm off to take care of some more details in the room now.......

I'm partying at:

Flaunt it Friday
and
Show and Tell Friday
and
It's a HodgePodge Friday
and